The 2014 State of the Union address was billed as the speech in which President Obama would finally reveal himself as the progressive champion we’d been promised. In the weeks prior, senior administration officials leaked word that the president would use his platform to declare income inequality the “defining challenge of our time,” a claim he’d first made two years prior, in a highly touted speech in Osawatomie, Kansas.

Then, in early February, news came that the phrase “income inequality” had been scrapped from subsequent drafts, replaced by an emphasis on “ladders of opportunity.” In Osawatomie, the president decried runaway inequality as a threat to the legitimacy of American democracy.